Doyle laid me on the bed between the two of them, my favoritest place in the world to be, and for once I felt nothing but a dim numbness, like trying to sense the world while wrapped carefully in cotton and put away somewhere so I wouldn’t break.
Frost was above me, propped up on one arm. He touched my face, traced the still-wet track of my tears, and said, “Merry, our Merry, what has happened to make you weep so?”
I stared up into that heartbreakingly handsome face, those gray eyes, and I saw again that image that sometimes showed in them, like the inside of some magical miniature snow globe. It was a winter-barren tree on a hillside with snow all around it, but for the first time there was a mist of pink buds, the promise of blossoms to come. For no reason that I could name, the sight of that promising pink blush of life made me start to cry again.
I wept as if my heart would break and spill out of my eyes in shattered pieces on the sheets, and their hands tried to comfort me and save the pieces I was crying away. The light and the dark hands touching me, caressing, their voices saying all the things you say when the people you love are in pain. I started to yell at them, tell them that they were wrong, that it wouldn’t be all right, that it would never be all right. I told them they were lying to themselves if they believed it would be all right. I screamed and cried and fought, and it wasn’t them I was fighting, it was everything else, but as so often happens it’s your nearest and dearest who take the brunt of your rage.
Arms found me that wouldn’t let go, that held me so tight that I couldn’t push them away or struggle free. I was pressed against a chest, held in arms so strong that it felt as if nothing could move them or tear them from me. Strength like that could have made me panic, but when Taranis had done what he did, he hadn’t held me tight; the injury had done that for him. He was a man who didn’t know how to hold on to anything, or anyone, but himself. The man who held me now knew how to hold and keep and protect, and I gave myself over to that strength. I collapsed into the dark solidity of his arms, my head pressed against his chest, arms limp at my sides as I let myself cry in a way I hadn’t allowed myself yet. I cried until there were no more tears, and I felt empty like a seashell that held only echoes of what it had once been.
I ended up lying on top of him, my head on his chest so I could hear the sure beat of his heart, while one arm held me close and the other stroked my hair. Doyle’s deep voice rumbled up through his chest as he whispered, “Merry, Merry, Merry.”
The bed moved and I knew it was Frost; then his hand stroked my back, and he said, “I would do anything to take this pain from you.”
I turned my head so that my other cheek lay on Doyle’s chest while I looked at Frost. He lay on his side beside us, his hand still laid gently on me. Tears shone on his face, his eyes looking darker gray than usual like clouds before it rains, heavy and dark, or maybe that was just how I felt.
“I know that,” I said, and my voice was still thick with tears.
He lay down beside Doyle, who moved his arm from holding me to let Frost slip into the circle of his arm, and put his arm across me and hold me against Doyle’s body. Frost’s head lay on Doyle’s shoulder, one long leg going over Doyle’s legs, so we lay entwined, the three of us. I loved seeing two such big, physical men hold each other, and hold me like this. It made me feel safer and more complete than anything ever had.
Yet even here with them, the fear wasn’t gone. It was pushed back, but it was like a battle; being here with them meant I was safe and happy for now, but the next wave of invaders was coming. Maybe that was always true of life? I’d had a professor in college who said we were all temporarily able-bodied; at the time I hadn’t understood, but I did now. Were we all just temporarily happy? Or were we all just temporarily sad? I guess it depended on how you looked at things.
I reached out and traced the tracks of tears on Frost’s cheek. “Why are you crying?” I asked.
“Because you are, and I love you,” he said.
I laid my hand against his cheek, and my hand was so small that I couldn’t cover the whole side of his face even with my fingertips spread.
“I do not love you less because I do not cry,” Doyle said.
I moved my head enough so I could see his face. “I know that,” I said.
“We both know that,” Frost said, and moved his head just enough so he could meet the other man’s eyes, so that we were both gazing up at Doyle.
He looked down at both of us, from inches away, and suddenly he smiled bright and glorious in the darkness of his face. “I had given up such dreams as this.”
“As what?” I asked.
He hugged both of us with the arm he had around each of us. “This, the two of you in my arms, gazing at me like that. It is more than I ever hoped to have again, one person to love and be loved by, but to have both of you is such riches as no man would ever expect in one lifetime.”
I smiled at him, and I knew that Frost was, too, but I glanced to see that smile, those gray eyes gazing up at our tall, dark, and handsome man.
“I, too, had no thought of ever being this happy again,” Frost said.
“I’ve never been this happy,” I said.
They both looked at me. “Not even when you were in love with Griffin?” Frost asked.
“I wasn’t in love with Griffin when my father made him my fiancé, but he was handsome and sidhe, and my father’s choice.”
“So it was a political coupling, not a love match?” Doyle asked.
I nodded, my chin resting on his chest.
“We all envied him,” Frost said.
I turned to look at him. “You and the other guards talked about it?”
“No,” he said, and seemed to think about it, and finally said, “I can only say, I envied him.”
“I didn’t think you even liked me,” I said.
He smiled. “I will admit that it wasn’t you, our Merry, but more any woman at that point, but when I saw you look at him with your face shining with love, then I envied him you.”
I sighed. “I did grow to love him, but looking back at all of it I don’t think he ever loved me. If he’d gotten me pregnant we would have married, and I’m not sure when I would have figured out how little he valued me.”
Doyle raised his hand from my body to touch my hair, and Frost laid a kiss on my shoulder. “We love you,” Frost said.
“I know that, and I love you, but it is true love, not some infatuation made up of sex and magic. It is loving you that’s let me look back at his behavior and realize that he must never have truly loved me.”
Frost laid his face against mine, and Doyle kissed the top of my head. Doyle lay back down and cuddled us both tighter in his arms. “Whatever comes, we can see it through together. For all the blessings that we have in our lives right now, there is nothing I would not do to defend us, and our children.” He smiled again, that bright surprise of a smile.
“The babies are a wonder to me,” Frost said, softly.
Doyle rose so that he could lay a quick kiss on his lips, and then I rose so he could share that kiss between us. “I’ve never been in love with someone I called friend before, Frost; it is everything we were as friends and now all this, and to be fathers together”—he hugged us again—“I am happier than I can remember.”
Frost got that almost-shy smile that he only seemed to get when the three of us were alone, and it was usually from something that Doyle said, not me. I wasn’t sure why it worked that way, but I knew it did.
He turned to me that pale handsome face, those serious gray eyes. “Whatever comes, Merry, we will face it together, with the other fathers at our side. Never has such might been joined in one purpose among us; we will prevail against all that stand against us. We can do this.”
“How can you be so certain?” I asked.
He smiled. “Because such love as ours cannot be without purpose, and if it were wasted by death or tragedy this soon, it would be without purpose, and I do not believe the Goddess and
the Consort so cruel as that.”
The first pale, pink rose petal fell from empty air to land on Doyle’s shoulder. A second joined it as I said, “I am sorry that I lost faith for a moment. I love you both more than I have words to say; you are my hearts, and I will not despair again if the two of you are with me.” I touched Frost’s face again and gazed into those eyes. “I am blessed by Goddess and the Consort in so many ways; how dare I give in to sorrow.”
The petals kept falling, as if we were inside an invisible snow globe that was full of summer warmth instead of winter cold.
“The Goddess and Consort are with us, Merry, with us in a way that they have not been in centuries,” Doyle said.
“But magic is returning to our enemies, too,” I said, and I felt that hard knot in my stomach again. I realized that I was afraid of Taranis, truly afraid.
The rose petals began to slow, but the scent of a summer meadow with the wild roses sweet and thick-smelling in the heat was stronger.
“There is a purpose to that, as well, I think,” Doyle said.
I knew he was right, so why couldn’t I let go of my fear?
“In another few days I will be completely healed, and then the three of us can celebrate our happiness again,” Frost said.
“Does it sound odd to say that I’ve missed you both terribly when we’ve spent most of the last year sleeping next to each other?” I asked.
“No,” they said together, and then they laughed, a wonderful deep, shared masculine sound that I loved.
“You are meeting Sholto two days from now at the beach house, correct?” Doyle asked.
“Yes.”
“Then it’s our turn,” Frost said.
I looked from one to the other of them, and felt a deep, happy shiver run through my body that finally spilled out enough to make me writhe.
Doyle laughed again, “Oh, don’t do that again; my self-control is only so good.”
Frost sat up, pulling away from us. “You and Merry can have sex now, and in a day or so we can all be together.”
Doyle caught hold of his wrist and held him beside us. “No, my friend, we will break our fast together.”
“You do not have to wait for me,” Frost said.
“If I loved only Merry, then there would be no point to waiting, but I love you both, and that is worth waiting for,” Doyle said. His face was fierce as he said it.
Frost gave that shy smile and then looked down, his silver hair spilling forward to hide his face. “You shall make me cry again, Darkness.”
Doyle smiled, not fierce this time, but gentle. “That you both cry for love of me delights me.”
We both looked at him, and I didn’t have to see Frost’s face to know we were giving our Darkness almost the same look from both our faces. We loved him. He loved us. I loved Frost. Frost loved me. It was all more wonderful than I had ever dreamed. Doyle was right; as long as we were together, nothing would stop us. I believed that, I honestly did, but … but I was still afraid. I was beginning to wonder if Dogmaela was right. Maybe I did need a therapist. My father had taken me to one as a child, because I’d had flashback nightmares about Aunt Andais drowning me, or trying to drown me. She’d done it because no sidhe could die by drowning. Her reasoning had been that if she could drown me, then I wasn’t truly sidhe, and so I would be no loss. The therapist had helped me process it all; maybe the right one could help me again.
I gazed at the two men in my bed. They were worth fighting for, even if that fight was against the issues in my own head. I knew Maeve had seen someone after her husband died of cancer, and the therapist had helped her deal with the grief. I had everything I could ever want and more, but I felt like I was grieving something; maybe it was time to find out what.
I kissed them both, long and thoroughly, then went to find Maeve and apologize to Aisling for falling apart all over him. He would tell me not to worry about it, that it was his honor or something, but he wasn’t my lover, or my love, so I’d apologize, because that level of care should come with love attached to it somewhere.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR
THE THREE OF us, and then the five of us, talked for hours about everything that was worrying me. Doyle, Frost, Galen, Rhys, and Mistral had all had different points of view that helped me think and helped us all plan. Maeve had joined us in interviewing lesser fey for nanny duty. We thought we’d found some possible candidates. We’d done what we could to plan about the babies, especially about Bryluen’s powers. Aisling had helped reassure us that we did not need to veil her; he said her power did not come from her face. So she was still a concern, but that particular fear was gone. We’d gone back to the days when I had no hand of power and kept bags of antinightmare herbs tucked into our pillows; so far either it was working, or Taranis had not tried to invade anyone else’s dreams. It was odd that we really couldn’t know if the herbs worked, only if they didn’t. I realized that having real sidhe magic had made me arrogant like the rest of the nobles, and I’d thrown out almost all the anti-fey practices I’d used for years to keep me safer around my relatives. It seemed odd that I, of all people, would forget that there are so many more kinds of magic than just sidhe, but I had. I was part human and part lesser fey through my brownie heritage. I needed to remember all the parts of myself, not just one.
We planned, we talked to Sholto via mirror about our plans, and then two days later I was standing on a windswept beach waiting for him. One of his titles was Lord of That Which Passes Between, and that was why we were at the edge of the sea where the water met the sand in swirling, whooshing waves. The edge of the surf is one of the between places, neither dry land nor water, but both, and neither. The edge of a woods that bordered a meadow or a plowed field would probably be where he started, hundreds of miles away in Illinois, because that was a place that was neither wild nor tame, a place between. He was also able to control the recently dead, animating them until their bodies were well and truly dead, and he could call a taxi out of nowhere, or any kind of transport that spent its time going between places.
The wind was cold off the water—not winter cold, it was L. A., but still plenty cold as it whipped my short skirt around my thighs. I was happy for the thigh-high hose with their lace edges, because it was at least something between my legs and the wind. I was standing on the next-to-last step on the long stairs that led from the house on the cliff above to the pale sand. The high-heeled pumps would look awesome as I walked back up the stairs, but they weren’t meant for protection from the elements. I’d dressed for cute and sexy, not standing beside the ocean in the early-morning chill. Even in June, Southern California could have mornings that felt more like Midwestern fall.
“Princess Meredith, please take my jacket.” Becket, one of the human DSS guards, held out his suit jacket, which left most of his arsenal of weapons very visible against his white dress shirt. His tie was like a black stripe down his chest, held in place against the wind with a tie bar, so generic I wondered if it had come standard government issue. He was broad through the shoulders, and without the jacket on, the shirt sleeves seemed to strain just a touch over the muscles of his arms, which meant his jacket was going to be huge on me.
His partner, Cooper, said, “Let her have mine, Becket; yours will swallow her.”
Cooper was a few inches taller, a few years younger, and a lot more slender. If I hadn’t had so many sidhe to compare him to I’d have used words like willowy and graceful to describe Cooper, but he was only human, and that put more bulk on his thin frame, and meant that he’d never have the speed or dancing grace of the nonhuman guards. His hair was truly black, and he had the skin tone to match. Becket was one of those blonds with a ruddy complexion as if he’d burned years ago and never been able to get rid of all of it. He had his pale hair cut so close to his head that it was as if he had started to shave himself bald, but stopped most of the way through. Coop’s hair was thick, and longer on top than any of the other diplomatic specialists assigne
d to us. I wondered if he put hair gel in it and went out to clubs in his spare time.
He helped me slip into the jacket. It was still warm from his body, and smelled faintly of nice aftershave. I was betting he fought to keep his hair long enough to style. I didn’t blame him, but it was just interesting. He was also one of the few of the men who weren’t married or in a serious relationship.
Becket and most of the others had been eager to have a diplomatic assignment in the States so they could be with their loved ones more. It was hard to maintain a relationship from halfway around the world, and usually in a place too dangerous to bring your family. Los Angeles was dangerous, but not in the same way as Pakistan.
“We really appreciate you asking for us this morning, Princess Meredith,” Coop said.
“You’re welcome, Agent Cooper, Agent Becket.” I wrapped his jacket around me. It covered me to midcalf, as if I’d borrowed my father’s coat to wear, but I was warmer, and that seemed more important than looking sexy, for now.
“Not to look a gift horse in the mouth,” Becket said, “but why us?”
I smiled at him, because I’d already learned that he could never quite leave well enough alone. He had to ask that one more question, take that one more small chance. Cooper would never have asked.
“I saw you practicing with the other guards.”
He looked embarrassed, rubbing his big blunt-fingered hands down his sides. “Yeah, that wasn’t such a great idea.”
“I told you that before we did it,” Cooper said.
Becket shrugged those big shoulders. “Hey, how do we tell the princess here that we can take care of her, if we don’t know how we stack up against her main guards?”
“That was the reasoning that made me agree to it,” Cooper said, but he didn’t look happy about it.
“You both acquitted yourselves well,” I said.
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